“O, Magnify the Lord with Me”

Worship & the Church - Part 1

Psalm 34 begins, “I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul will make its boast in the Lord; the humble will hear it and rejoice. O magnify the Lord with me, And let us exalt His name together” (Ps. 34:1-3).

Think about the three words that begin verse 3: “Magnify the Lord.” How in the world can we possibly do that? How can we weak, insignificant creatures, who struggle just to make it through a day, possibly make the almighty, infinite God of the universe bigger than He already is? Well, the answer is that we can’t in absolute terms, but we can in our own hearts and our own minds.

Too often, in my heart, in my mind, I am big and God is small. My personal problems, my love of sin, and my distracted mind take my eyes off of Him and put them squarely on me. And so David tells me here to take my eyes off of self and put them where they belong, to magnify God, to exalt Him, to lift Him up, because, as he goes on to say in the rest of this marvelous Psalm, He has delivered me from my fears, He has heard my cry, and He has saved me, “O taste and see that the Lord is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” (Ps. 34:8).

Psalm 34 is all about worship, and worship is a topic every Christian needs to understand, because biblical worship is incredibly important, perhaps even infinitely so. I have no new apologetic to offer on worship, just a clear sense of the most important apologetic, the biblical mandate to worship and what it means to us as Christians today.

Worship is incredibly important. It must be, because it is commanded times without number in the Scriptures. We just saw one example in Psalm 34. Here’s another, from Psalm 2:11, “Worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice with trembling.” And another, Psalm 95:6, “Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.”

We could go on and on and on because the command to worship the Lord, along with its cognates: magnify, praise, exalt, bow, etc., is the most repeated command in Scripture. Why is worship commanded so many times? 

First, Scripture so often commands worship because worship is something God seeks. Jesus made that clear in John 4:23, “an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.”

There is a truth there that is easy for us to miss: the almighty Creator of the universe, who sustains all life and being by His power, who is utterly blessed, infinitely beyond the understanding of His creation, seeks worship from His creation. There should be a little exclamation point going off in your head right now at this awesome truth!

But by the very fact of who He is: the Creator, Sustainer, Infinite, Blessed, He is infinitely worthy of worship, and so it is right for Him to seek it. That’s the second reason worship is so often commanded in Scripture.

Finally, worship is often commanded in Scripture because it brings Him pleasure. God tells the returned Exiles to rebuild the Temple in Haggai 1:8, “Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored, says the LORD.” He doesn’t take pleasure in the architecture of the building; He takes pleasure in the act of worship of building it, and in the acts of worship that will take place there.

Some four dozen times in Scripture the offerings of the Temple are called a “pleasing aroma” to God. God takes pleasure in worship, so we worship God because He is worthy of it, because He seeks it, and because He takes pleasure in it. Clearly, to say worship is important is an understatement.

And yet, were I to ask half a dozen Christians to define worship, I might get half a dozen different answers. Some might say worship is feeling love and devotion toward God. Others might say that worship is the singing before the sermon. Still others might dismiss everything before the sermon as mere preliminaries and say the sermon itself is the worship. Many might say that worship is the 11:00 Sunday morning service.

In Scripture, two groups of words are translated “worship.” first, the Hebrew ‘âbad and Greek latreuō, mean “to serve,” and refer to the work of the priests in the Tabernacle and Temple. As they offered sacrifices to Yahweh they were serving Him, a formal rite of worship before God.

That’s why Peter says we are priests. When we talk about the priesthood of the believer, we usually mean the blessed truth that we don’t need a mediator to stand between us and God. But Peter has a different priestly function in mind in 1 Peter 2:5, “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

Like the priests of old offered burnt offerings and sacrifices of grain and drink, we too are to offer up sacrifices acceptable to God, only spiritual ones. “Spiritual sacrifices” refers to all our service to God, but there is a particular kind of service that “worship” often refers to. That’s the second group of words translated “worship” in Scripture. The Hebrew shâchâh and Greek proskuneō mean to “bow down,” or “bend the knee.” That physical act came to mean giving homage to someone, recognizing their worth. In fact, our English word “worship” comes from that idea of ascribing worth, which in Old English was “worth-ship,” shortened to worship.

We use the word loosely when we say someone worships money, or status, or power. But in our relationship with God, we elevate the idea of worship to its true object. That’s what Peter has in view in 2:9: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

The “royal priesthood” (that’s us) proclaim the excellencies of the God who saved us; we tell of His worth, His greatness, His goodness, and His grace. And so to worship God is to ascribe supreme worth to Him. As John Stott puts it in The Living Church, “To worship is to ‘glory in God’s holy name.’ Indeed, we are to join with all creatures in pronouncing Him worthy of our praise, because He is both our Creator and our Redeemer (Revelation 5:9-14). Because of who God is, it is appropriate that we should ‘worship at his footstool (Psalm 99:5).’”

Old Testament worship was linked to the formal service of the Temple. That dynamic is transformed in the New Testament so that worship is no longer fixed in a place, it is fixed in a person, the Lord Jesus Christ. There are no more Temple priests, now we are all priests, we all offer spiritual sacrifice, we all proclaim his excellencies.

And because that’s true, in Jesus, all of life is worship in the broadest possible sense. That’s what Romans 12:1 is all about, “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.”

We worship as living sacrifices when we live so that all we do brings God glory. We worship as living sacrifices when we obey God’s commands to build one another up, to make disciples, to love one another. We worship as living sacrifices when we live out 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

Jesus has made that possible through His once-for-all sacrifice of Himself for our sins, Hebrews 13:15, “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.” How often? Continually.

In other words, there are no more sacred times, spaces, or places. Every Christian is to worship everywhere, all the time. In your private life, your family life, and of particular importance to this study, when we come together for corporate worship on Sundays.

Worship is not a church service. The service itself is only a setting in which worship may occur. In the next article we will look at what the Scriptures say about corporate worship.

Tim Schoap is co-pastor of Signal Mountain Bible Church in Signal Mountain, Tenn.